


William Afton - AU Profile

by ms_robophile



Category: Five Nights at Freddy's
Genre: Background Relationships, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:54:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22895218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ms_robophile/pseuds/ms_robophile
Relationships: William Afton | Dave Miller/Mrs. Afton
Kudos: 9





	William Afton - AU Profile

**Appearance:**  
William could be described as approachably handsome, neither tall nor short, thick nor thin. In many regards, except for his slightly larger front teeth, there is nothing in the mold of his features that marks him out. However, his Englishness is unmistakable, and he matured into his looks as he entered his late thirties.

What does stand out about him is his sense of dress. He is fond of three-piece suits, all well-tailored and made of fine material. When labor demands it, he will wear work denim, but he’d never be caught dead in jeans.

 **Personality:**  
William possesses a naturally acerbic wit, a deep intellect, and a reserved energy when he is not performing as Bonnie. While his emotions can run riot, he never shows it, always giving the air of a man in full command of his manner and motions. He is known to be sly and prefers to dominate in whatever situation he finds himself.

His outer, slick charm carefully masks his insecurities, particularly when it comes to females. Very few people have ever truly known William Afton.

 **History:**  
William Clyde Afton, born to a pair of cuniculturalists in 1945 in Caterham, England. It was his exposure to his parents' trade that introduced him to two lifelong obsessions: rabbits and death. Young Will saw more than his fair share of life and death on the farm. He escaped into intellectual pursuits, including the repair and construction of machinery. The anatomy of devices spoke to him, seemed as natural as breathing from the first moment he dismantled the family radio.

His strongest connection to the world of the living was a rabbit he saved from its unhappy fate, sneaking the animal into his room at three years old. He wanted to call him Bunny but his large front teeth gave him a slight speech impediment. The name came out as "Bonnie" instead. His teeth and the rabbit later earned him scorn from his schoolmates. Billy Bunny became the jeer that stuck with him even into his adolescence.

At seventeen, a nightmare occurred: his parents were killed in an automobile crash. This left him with only distant relations with whom he was not terribly close. He tried to further his education in London, but found the youth scene exhausting and used his small inheritance to immigrate to the United States and enrolled in university.

There, he met a young man named Henry, who shared his interests for engineering, robotics, and esoterica.

He finally had not only an intellectual peer, but a real friend. They didn't just dream big, they dreamed the impossible. They wanted to change the face of robotics entirely, but as college kids, did not have the funding required to follow their controversial passions. They were convinced that there was more to the universe than the material. There were energies and forces that gave shape to life and spirit, a topic that would have been snubbed in academia.

However, they both decided to approach the quandary in a different way:

Henry believed that if a machine imitated organic life with sufficient complexity, it could be suitable for hosting an intelligence and soul.

William believed if you created an artificial intelligence of sufficient complexity, the body didn't matter, and a soul would form around the intelligence.

Their rivalry was friendly, and they often would debate their views far into the night, their dorm filled in a herbal haze of the late '60s. It was during one of these sessions that the young men conceived of a way to raise capital: open a restaurant for kids with robot entertainers. Animatronics were on the rise and they were confident they could eventually product the most realistic entertainment robots on the market.

Of course, this was just the superficial work. The real experiments were yet to come.

After graduation, they set their business ideas into motion. It was during this period that Henry met a woman, Angela, with whom he developed a romance. This occurred while William set his eyes on his partner's sister, Jennifer. Jen was, in most regards, the opposite of her brother. Henry was very open to new ideas, personable, and curious. Jen was a staunch Catholic with a rather brusque personality. William found her conservative rage fascinating and engaged the woman any time they chanced to meet. His desire to dominate urged him to win the frigid woman, but she spurned his advances.

Henry and William purchased a very cheap lot and began their first restaurant, Fredbear's Family Diner. It was the early '70s. They had no money for real robots, so they settled on mascot costumes. William had long since developed a character, Bonnie the trickster rabbit, and Henry invented his avuncular counterpart, Fredbear.

The restaurant was a success, given the dearth of children's entertainment in the dusty small town of Hurricane, Utah. Kids began to come from the neighboring cities, such as St. George, to grab a bite of pizza and watch the bear and rabbit sing their silly songs and dance their silly dances.

William's Bonnie persona won everyone over, including Jen. She believed William could be good with children and seemed to have business acumen to balance what she saw an unhealthy obsession with godless science. With time and patience, although she reserved her passion solely for argument, she eventually consented to marry her dopey brother's best friend. She felt he had earning potential and even prudish Jen could not deny the dark sensuality of his voice.

Henry decided the most efficient solution to their problem was to create a robotic endoskeleton for the mascot costumes, so the suits could be worn by human performers for more complicated tasks but could be set on stage for the main show. William delighted in the concept but questioned the safety of the springlock mechanisms. Just a bit more development, he posited, could allow for some redundancy in the system, which would allow for a partial failure without major injury to the robot, suit, or wearer. Henry refused, being a man who lived by the credo, "waste not, want not".

William conceded. They were experts and he was a newly wedded man. It would all work out and for a few years, it did. During this time, the two men produced children, although neither would particularly good fathers, being the creators of artificial children who were far less fussy and held so much more potential than their own flesh and blood. Henry had his daughter Charlotte and young Michael was born to William, a boy who seemed like a perfect copy of his father.

Unfortunately, the Afton household had never been as warm as he'd have liked. Jen was a very dutiful wife and mother, in terms of housekeeping, but as a lover and friend proved to be rather distant and cold. She viewed sex as means to an end: to reproduce. She was unwilling to indulge in Afton's more aggressive, unusual sexual proclivities, including the occasional desire to escape into his persona, the rabbit. William often slipped into the skin of his character, both literally and figuratively, in times of strain. She only ever desired him (thinking his advances as the rabbit were a joke) when she felt she was ripe to try for another baby.

William resented her, but he resolved to not stray nor turn to chemical to cope. Instead, he threw himself entirely into his work: both as a performer, an entrepreneur, and roboticist.

Their home life grew stagnant, then acrimonious, as Michael remained an only child for years. Jen cried and plead, her beliefs barring her from seeking divorce. Grudgingly, William gave her another child: Elizabeth, the apple of her mother's eye. William seemed wholly detached from the girl, even as Michael attempted to earn his father's love. He showed the talent for machines and that earned him respect but never quite the praise that his son needed.

Jen hated that William was corrupting their precious boy with his unholy love for machines, which despite her best efforts, could not dissuade him from pursuing, wishing he would focus solely on the business and leave the science to Henry. They fought fiercely every night, leaving a toddler Elizabeth to wonder why all the faces in her home frowned instead of smiled.

None of this mattered, of course. The marriage ended in a way none of them could have anticipated. It happened just before a performance, just as William was slipping into his costume: the springlocks gave, rending William's flesh to ribbons, piercing organs, breaking bones. He languished on a ventilator, a torn hunk of meat, for two weeks. The doctors said he was effectively dead.

Henry felt incredible guilt and could not accept the death of someone who truly was family. He worked feverishly over those two weeks, selling major assets of the restaurant, throwing every bit of sweat and intellect into a solution. He would save his friend. He would, even if it meant stealing Afton's body from a hospital. Even if it meant defying all natural law.

He used his combination of the mystic and machine to imbue a robot host with life: _William Afton's_ life. The appearance was uncanny, the materials meticulously crafted to look organic. At first, all were amazed at the miraculous return of a man who seemed to be unsalvageable. There he was, as alive as ever and none were more thrilled than William himself: their theories had proven sound. That high would not last long.

Jen, having ferreted out something close to the truth, told him their marriage was over, that he'd died that day and given her more than enough godly justification to take her and the children away for good. She consented to a legal parting of the ways, but only because he'd cheated his way back to life. Her God would surely side with her. She cut ties with Henry, as well. They were evil men who would breed more evil. The least she could do was spare herself and the innocent lives of their children.

The courts, however, did not deny William partial custody. He took every opportunity to take the children, even as he sought out a new home. He found the perfect location: a decommissioned missile silo in the wastes of Utah. It would serve as a lab, one all his own. He founded his own company, Afton Robotics, and built a beautiful house on top of it to retain the image of normalcy.

It didn't work, though. William was changed. He began sporting his signature purple to distract the eye from his artificial face. He restored and bought an old Plymouth Fury, his equally purple rolling iron, which did very little to win him favor in the eyes of the sleepy little town.

As a machine, he found his brilliance _enhanced_ , no longer shackled by the need for sleep or food. He began to take on small military contracts, amassing wealth at a slow and steady pace. Methodically, he pushed Henry further out of the business, selling franchise opportunities to other nearby cities.

Fredbear's was about to change forever. In 1983, tragedy struck: a young boy was bitten by one of the robots and hospitalized. Seeing himself reflected in the boy, William decided to save him in the same way that Henry had saved him. Henry was appalled, realizing how bad of an idea it was to use machines to save human lives in this way.

Yet in this case, a humanoid host would not do. The world would know and would not accept. No. Instead, William would give them an even better surprise: the children would become the animals! They loved the characters, so what would be better than to be the characters?

So it started with other children. A boy accidentally shot in the face by his brother. Michael's friend Jeremy having tumbled from his motorbike. Another dying of cancer. Henry knew that William was ending their misery early, but he did not approve. It went on until William converted a girl from a bad home. She wasn't dying, she was merely neglected and that was the final line crossed. Henry resolved to destroy his friend.

The opportunity never came. The worst thing imaginable happened. His baby girl, his little Charlotte, was killed. He knew William had done it, either for revenge or as a warning, but there was never any proof. She'd been hassled and locked in the back alley by bullies. No cause of death was identified. There were no signs of trauma, poison, or harm. It seemed the life had simply left her.

The truth was alarming and an unintended consequence of the conversion process: Henry had created vampire. Not one that fed on blood, but on something William called LP--life potential. If he failed to replenish his stores, William found himself logy, depressed, unable to die but unable to act and experiencing a kind of existential pain and starvation. He hadn't meant to kill Charlotte, but she was his first "meal" and he'd taken too much. 

It worked out in his favor, however: Henry and Angela were broken, too consumed with grief. Henry receded into himself, but underneath it, still plotted to unmake the monster he'd created.

William completely took over the business and rebranded it with new characters. Circus Baby would be the new sensation, a character which appealed endlessly to his own child. Despite Jen's warnings and his own warnings, the girl would not stay away from the towering clown. Just as Charlotte's life had been cut short, Elizabeth was mangled by the very robot she'd loved so much. Jen and Michael were devastated.

William did not know what to do. The child had always been destructive and willful and now she inhabited a powerful machine. Best to keep her in check through carefully placed shocks and isolation.

This left William with no one. No friend, no wife, and a son who never wanted to see him. He grew paranoid, despondent.

His loneliness did not persist overlong. During a late-night and quite illegal run at the local chemical plant, he happened upon a woman who did not seem to mind him at all. Having been so desperate, finding this helpless creature alone in such a large facility, he felt human desires awaken from dormancy, the memory of want, the need for a woman’s touch, even if he’d not inhabited flesh in full five years. He wore the skin of the rabbit, and while it scared the woman, she was also intensely curious about this strange creature come crawling from the pizzeria.

When he asked her name and she replied with Jennifer, he felt it was kismet. The universe had served him up a boon, overturning an egregious offense to his masculinity. He found her delightfully receptive to his appetites, although he was initially afraid that she would be repulsed by what he was and what he’d done. The opposite was true. He could exert his need for dominance when the mood struck, but found in the "new" Jennifer a woman also capable of insightful conversation with a black sense of humor to match. He needed to possess her, completely make her _his_.

William pressed her into moving in with him within days. He wanted her at his side, in his bed, exploring his lab. The marriage proposal came mere weeks later and their wedding happened on Christmas Day, 1989. To ensure she would not wither and decline, he crafted for her a synthetic host, which she gladly accepted. It was his most ambitious project yet: an entire upgrade to previous designs and the first female humanoid host.

It seemed everything had finally fallen into place for William. He had a woman who seemed crafted of the anti-matter left behind by prudish, close-minded Jen. Michael even liked her a little. Shaken from his fugue, his ambitions stirred.

And this time, he wouldn’t fail. With his immortal bride at his side, he knew that the world would soon be his oyster.


End file.
